Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Monday, February 12, 2018

Here’s an unusual and striking house with high-Victorian curb appeal. At 334 Clinton Street in Cobble Hill, it’s a mid-19th century Greek Revival built as a twin to No. 336 next door. You’d be hard pressed to figure that out by looking at it though.

GREECE'S Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, his counterpart from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Nikola Dimitrov, and United ... that his administration has snubbed the recent protests in GREECE against the neighboring country being allowed to use the term “Macedonia” in a name.

Influential Bank of GREECE (BoG) Governor Yannis Stournaras on Monday repeated his position that a precautionary credit line would assist the Greek economy after the end of the current - third - bailout in August, saying such a prospect would keep borrowing costs low and aid the country's full return to ...

The first six months of the SYRIZA-Independent Greeks government in 2015 didn't just cost GREECE 100 billion euros, but “probably twice as much,” the former head of the Euro Working Group, Thomas Wieser, told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant in an interview. Crucially, he believes that it wasn't just ...

It's been almost 500 years since Shakespeare first asked what's in a name, but in Europe, the debate is still roiling — with consequences that are far more global though no less dire than the ones that befell Verona's two star-crossed lovers. The modern ...

Members of Rubicon anarchist group disrupted a speech by Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Athens on Monday. The perpetrators threw flyers and shouted slogans. According to police sources, authorities trapped the perpetrators in the building and ...

Novartis, the Swiss pharma giant at the heart of a huge corruption scandal in Greece on Monday said it would take “fast and decisive action” to prevent future breaches of trust. In a statement, it said Novartis “continues to cooperate fully with the GREEK and US authorities, we have also been conducting ...

Visits to GREEK museums and archaeological sites in October 2017 jumped 14 pct and 19.8 pct, respectively, in comparison with the same month in 2016, the Hellenic Statistical Authority ELSTAT reported on Monday, according to ANA. The rise in total visitors to museums included a 6.7 pct hike in ...

The tide is rolling in for St. Clair County, on the shores of the St. Clair River. After a decade of building on the region's assets — its unmatched location at the gateway to Lake Huron, its inspiring nautical heritage, the hard work of local …

ATHENS – Greece’s central banker said on Monday he favours a precautionary credit line for the country after it completes its adjustment program in the […] The post Stournaras Says he Favours Precautionary Credit Line for Greece appeared first on The National Herald.

Two hundred years ago, there lived a GREEK 'Pundit' by the name Demetrios Galanos (1760-1833) in Varanasi. Son of a wealthy family from Athens, and trained in priesthood in the seminary at Patmos, he ended up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as tutor to children of GREEK merchants in the city. But within a ...

“I assure you of my constant closeness in prayer: that the Risen Lord will be near you and accompany you in the mission entrusted to you,” Pope Francis said February 12, 2018, when meeting at the Vatican with members of the Greek Melkite Synod gathered ...

If you saw people in firefighter gear on the slopes at GREEK Peak this weekend, that was the 11th annual Winter Games sponsored by the Firefighters Association of the State of New York. There was a hose relay, tug-of-war and a geo-cached scavenger hunt. The idea was to sharpen skills and build ...

A Novartis building in Basel. The company has said it is cooperating fully with GREEK and US authorities. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images. The GREEK prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has called for parliament to investigate whether two of his predecessors and eight former ministers accepted ...

Alexander Zinell, Fraport GREECE CEO, said: “Our plan for the massive overhaul of Kos airport has begun. The safety of our passengers is a top priority for us, and for this reason, the reconstruction of the runway and apron pavement has been scheduled during the off-season. Kos airport will welcome the ...

Alcohol consumption among teenagers in GREECE is widespread, largely because it is considered socially acceptable, even taking place in the home. According to a study on youngsters aged up to 16 by the University Mental Health Research Institute (UMHRI) in Athens, conducted as part of the ...

Rongfeng Holding Group and a related party plan to acquire a majority stake in National Bank Of GREECE'S insurance unit Ethniki Hellenic General Insurance, according to a Reuters Feb. 12 report. In a press release, Rongfeng declared that, together with a related party it plans to acquire at least 75 ...

Greek prosecutors continue their investigation against Novartis, which is at the center of a bribery and corruption investigation concerning allegations that the Swiss pharmaceutical company paid bribes to politicians in exchange for fixing the prices of ...

… . 1. START WITH YOUR OWN GREEK ODYSSEY Never sailed before? Book … Stay And Sail holiday in Greece and take the Introduction To … a short break in the Greek islands? Based in Piraeus, the … in Turkey, Croatia, Italy and Greece. Full board and wine with …

The remaining part was meant to be bought by the US investment management firm, Calamos Family Partners, with which Exin embarked in a legal fight over the amount of stake within the GREEK insurer. Calamos also sued Exin over a €41m debt from previous lending arrangements which were due on ...

The company said that it is aware of reports that GREEK and U.S. authorities are investigating, and that it is doing its own internal probe, but can't comment on ongoing investigation and won't comment on speculation in the media, “which appears driven in large part by the selective leaking of portions of a ...

The 2018 Interfraternity Council President Gavin McGettigan said the year's agenda will focus on breeding collaboration and respectful, meaningful relationships throughout GREEK system to greater benefit the Auburn community. McGettigan, junior in business analytics, took office as this year's IFC ...

Former Health Minister and now Vice president of conservative New Democracy, Adonis Georgiadis has said “they should hang me at Syntagma” if they find kickbacks from Novartis. For one more time, the ND-Vice whose name is involved in the Novartis case file sent to Palriament, was trying to prove he had not involvement in the … The post Novartis: Ex health Minister says “They should hang me at Syntagma, if…” appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Greek police has arrested a 36-year-old Pakistani national on Monday for the stabbing of a British expat living on the island of Corfu on Saturday. The perpetrator had stabbed the 51-year-old expat allegedly suspecting he had an affair with his former girl friend. He had beaten the woman before stabbing the man. According to some … The post Greek Police arrests Pakistani for stabbing British Expat in Corfu appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

he GREEK government plans to recover billions of dollars from Novartis (NVS 1) for overcharging for medicines in connection with the sensational bribery scandal engulfing the country and embattling the drug maker. In comments to lawmakers on Monday, GREEK Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras urged ...

“The two challenge one another on music, life and the Almighty,” according to a Park Square news release. It will be directed by Frank Theatre's Wendy Knox. “Antigone” (Feb. 1-March 3 on the Andy Boss Thrust Stage) — Theatre Coup d'Etat's production of Sophocles' GREEK tragedy premiered in 2016.

GREEK police said on Monday that they have unraveled a gang that procured foreign women via a website and arrested 12 people. Among the victims of the gang was a young teenager from Bulgaria. According to the investigation, the gang members would recruit women, mainly from Albania and ...

Little GREEK Fresh Grill, a fast-casual GREEK restaurant with an American influence, has opened another Tampa Bay location in Riverview, Florida, according to Nick Vojnovic, Little GREEK president. The owner/operator is Nino DeLucia. Now in five states, Riverview is Little GREEK'S 34th location.

Of the three sea routes, most crossed via the Central Mediterranean route from North Africa to Italy with smaller numbers crossing via the Eastern Mediterranean route to GREECE and Cyprus and the Western Mediterranean route to Spain. Most arrivals by sea in 2017 were men (69%), largely due to the ...

Bulgaria's southern neighbor GREECE has shown great interest towards Bulgarian construction materials. The reason for the sudden rise in demand is the booming construction industry in GREECE. Bulgarian companies whose work is related to construction have noted a rise in interest towards their ...

[Digitization Insights] By Janosch Delcker | @janoschdelcker| Send tips to jdelcker@politico.eu | View in your browser _With thanks to Cat Contiguglia and Myfanwy Craigie_ WELCOME BACK to POLITICO Pro Digitization Insights. It’s Janosch Delcker, POLITICO’s AI Correspondent in Berlin and your host of this weekly newsletter in which we focus on how big data, AI and automation are changing the world as we know it. Let’s start with some of the news that caught our attention during the last few days: The technological revolution we’re experiencing will hit smaller cities much harder than big metropolises, a new study looking at U.S. cities suggests. It will also radically change farming — and the EU’s antitrust boss Margrethe Vestager warned that, in light of the upcoming takeover of Monsanto by German multinational Bayer, her agency had to “to ensure that the deal will not limit competition in digital farming and research.” One thing everyone can agree on is that Europe must boost innovation, otherwise it will fall behind in the global technology race. Any tech entrepreneur will tell you that to be innovative, you need money. And when it comes to get this funding, the U.K. remains the undefeated top dog in Europe, an analysis by Dutch venture capital database Dealroom suggests — with British investment now accounting for 37 percent of all investment in Europe. SPOTLIGHT: WAR Buried deep in Germany’s next government’s coalition agreement, on page 149, two overlooked sentences point to an imminent technological revolution that is about to change war as radically as nuclear weapons once did. “We reject autonomous weapon systems that lack human direction,” the document released last week states. “We want to ban them globally.” AI is not just revolutionizing the way we work, travel and live — it’s also about to change the way wars are fought around the globe, most prominently through the development and potential use of so-called lethal autonomous weapons or LAWs. Dubbed “killer robots” by their opponents, LAWs are systems that are technically able to hunt and attack targets on their own — and they’re far from just a sci-fi scenario. Later this week, leaders from around the world will flock to this year’s Munich Security Conference to discuss the most pressing security issues of our time — and it’s no coincidence that the first panel on Thursday afternoon, kicking off the conference’s influential side-events, is dedicated to the role AI will play in modern conflicts. (If you’ll be there, drop me a line.) The panelists include Estonia’s President Kersti Kaljulaid and former NATO former General Secretary Anders Fogh Rasmussen. It’s called “The Force Awakens.” That’s admittedly a clumsy metaphor — but you get the message. Stay tuned, we’ll have an in-depth article on the issue for you soon. BY THE NUMBERS: In an increasingly digitized world economy, access to fast internet is key. Here’s how the situation has changed across the EU: In the U.K., a former air force officer is meanwhile on a mission to bring ultra-fast internet speeds to people hundreds of kilometers away from London. Our Chief Technology Correspondent Mark Scott has more, or see below. GDPR COUNTDOWN: 101 DAYS TO GO. On May 25, Europe’s new privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), will take effect. One way or another, the rules will affect you. Here’s our financial services colleague Cat Contiguglia with the latest on a conundrum her sector faces: When it rains, it pours: As financial firms struggle to comply with the GDPR, they also have to reconcile it with the list of other new regulations coming online in 2018 that revolve around data collection — and that’s going to be far from easy, officials say. Firms face a hefty list of new regulations, including the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, the revised Payment Services Directive, and the fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive. All revolve around getting and holding more information. Late last week, regulators in the U.K. acknowledged the conundrum in a joint statement, saying, “We recognize that there are still ongoing discussions to ensure specific details of the GDPR can be implemented consistently within the wider regulatory landscape.” For example, Julian Parkin, a data protection expert leading GDPR implementation at a U.K. bank, told Cat that “there is an inherent conflict between the right to be forgotten and rules around anti-money laundering or fraud, as under those rules, you need to hold information for longer.” To deal with the conflict, the Financial Conduct Authority hosted an industry roundtable, and said it “will continue to collaborate in the coming months to address concerns firms raise.” To read more about this regulatory conflict, keep an eye out for an in-depth article coming soon to your inbox. SPEAKING OF THE U.K. AND DATA PRIVACY, “Open Banking” rules went online in January that require banks to make available client data to authorized third parties via a standard Application Program Interface or API. The point is to improve competition in banking, by, for example, allowing a customer to authorize an app to access their account details to find them the best offer on an account. But the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority sees a contradiction in asking clients to share more data ahead of new EU rules banning a dangerous form of data sharing go online. “Screen scraping” will be banned in the revised Payment Services Directive, but the part of the rules with the ban is not going to be in force for a while. In testimony to lawmakers last week, FCA chief executive Andrew Bailey lamented the delay, saying the FCA is “working with various industry bodies” and asking them, “can you put in place sensible standards in the meantime that balance openness against security objectives?” While Open Banking intends for apps to plug directly into banks just to get the data they are authorized, in “screen scraping,” an app logs into the client’s secure account with their login details. Allowing an app to directly access the whole of a client’s account with their actual details opens creates a much greater risk of fraud than going through an API. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, A GLOSSARY Talk about artificial intelligence is everywhere. What do all the terms thrown around actually mean? One buzzword at a time, we’ll get you up to date. Today: DEEP LEARNING. To us humans, learning comes naturally. (Well, to some more than others, but that’s not the point here.) The point is: To computers, it doesn’t. And that’s where deep learning comes in. It’s a technique that allows computers to mimic our thought patterns — and go far beyond that. In some instances, this can already help computers become better at recognizing objects, text or sound than humans ever could be. This unseen level of accuracy is the secret behind the success of deep learning; the technique has created quite a fuss during the last couple of years. Let’s say that if all AI technologies were a family, then “deep learning” would be the handsome mid-twentysomething whom everyone loves, who scored numerous global No. 1 hits during the last couple of years, and who already made billions for the family. Deep learning is, for example, the key technology behind driverless cars, the voice control in our smartphones or the software inside medical microscopes to identify cancer cells. When it comes to how most deep learning technology works, it’s crucial to understand the role of so-called neural networks — which we’ll cover in the weeks to come. Want to understand more about deep learning? A good start is Katrina Onstad’s impeccable profile of Geoffrey Hinton, the Canadian scientist who spent 30 years hammering away at deep learning while most other scientists dismissed his ideas as nonsense, in Toronto Life. (If you only have time for one longread this week, make it this one.) BOOKMARK THESE — FACIAL RECOGNITION: It’s one of the key AI technologies. But a test of software from IBM and Microsoft raises concerns about the systems being significantly less accurate when it comes to identifying black women, compared with white men: “The companies’ algorithms proved near perfect at identifying the gender of men with lighter skin, but frequently erred when analyzing images of women with dark skin.” — AI AND ETHICS: It’s a broad field — so Philosopher Paula Boddington narrowed her reading list down to the five books she believes people should read to understand the myriad ethical questions posed by artificial intelligence. — FINANCIAL CRIME: AI is also changing the way to how to rob a bank. Mark Gazit of cybersecurity company ThetaRay spoke with TechRepublic’s Dan Patterson about how AI is unleashing a new type of cybercrime. — A NEW SOCIETY, INVENTED BY BLOCKCHAIN? Meanwhile, dozens of wealthy tech entrepreneurs are heading to Puerto Rico to build a crypto utopia — a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public — to show the rest of the world what a crypto future could look like, the New York Times’ Nellie Bowles reports. — PRIVACY VS. SECURITY: It’s a question as old as democracy. National Geographic asks it again. “Technology and our increasing demand for security have put us all under surveillance,” journalist Robert Draper writes. “Is privacy becoming just a memory?” — NOT PRETTY, THAT DIGITAL FUTURE: Technologies distorting what’s real by manipulating our perception and falsifying reality are evolving faster than our ability to mitigate them, technologist Aviv Ovadya warns. “We are so screwed it’s beyond what most of us can imagine,” he told BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel. “We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we’re even more screwed now. And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse.” Tough outlook. Decide for yourself. ***POLITICO PRO ARTICLE*** HOW A BRITISH TELECOMS STARTUP IS BRIDGING UK’S RURAL DIGITAL DIVIDE — By Mark Scott KEYNSHAM, England — The rolling hills around this small market town on the outskirts of Bristol don’t exactly shout high-tech hot spot. Rural and sparsely populated, it’s the sort of place where big telecommunications operators would rarely invest to install a high-speed internet network. More often than not, local residents would be resigned to slow connections and poor mobile coverage — a digital gulf separating them from those in big cities like London. And yet, this rural community, located in southwest England, has some of the fastest internet speeds on the planet, thanks to a former British air force officer named Evan Wienburg. As chief executive of TrueSpeed, a local telecom startup, he’s behind a project that’s squarely out of place in a landscape dotted with farms, country pubs and centuries-old homes. Wienburg is building an ultra-fast fiber network across this rural English community. His mission: to debunk the belief that it’s not practical (or financially viable) to offer ultra-fast internet speeds — fast enough to download a high-definition movie within seconds — to people who live hundreds of kilometers from urban centers like Paris, Madrid or Berlin. “When you explain to people what we can offer them, it’s an easy sell,” said Wienburg, who secured £75 million last summer from Aviva, a British insurer, to roll out his network to roughly 75,000 mostly rural households in the southwest of England by 2022. “We don’t want to take government money,” Wienburg added, as he scrolled through an online map showing where his three-year-old telecom startup was digging ditches and erecting 8-meter poles to run fiber-optic cables — whose speeds can top out at more than one gigabit per second (that’s very fast, in non-geeky language) — directly to people’s homes in these rural communities. “We have a working business model that stands on its own.” It’s easy to dismiss TrueSpeed as a tiny operation — the startup has so far connected less than 2,000 households. But Wienburg and other rural telecom entrepreneurs from Sweden to Greece are accomplishing something that national telecoms monopolies and billions of euros of government subsidies have failed to achieve: connecting Europe’s rural communities to the internet and reducing the Continent’s widening digital divide. The need is certainly there. Only 40 percent of people living in the EU countryside have access to high-speed broadband, according to European statistics. That digital divide in speed and internet connectivity is one of many factors that contribute to rural isolation, economic sluggishness and even resentment of urban elites, which — in turn — can foster populist politics. But these European mom-and-pop telecoms providers are pushing back, by giving Europe’s rural citizens the type of internet coverage that big city dwellers take for granted. For Wienburg, TrueSpeed’s chief executive, the journey to becoming a rural broadbrand whiz started — as is often the case in the U.K. — at the pub. Soon after returning to Britain from years in the United States, he found himself at a community meeting at his local watering hole, complaining about how bad the connectivity was compared to his time in Virginia. “I couldn’t even make a phone call,” Wienburg recalled. “I moved back from the U.S. where internet connectivity wasn’t even an issue.” Most of us would just grumble about the poor internet speed, and move on. But the British entrepreneur decided to put his money where his mouth was, dipping into a pool of local investors and signing an agreement with a local energy provider to use its electricity poles to run fiber-optic cables across the countryside to connect individual homes to the internet. TrueSpeed also got lucky after it bought a 77-kilometer stretch of a high-speed cable network that connected London and New York, which — completely by chance — ran directly through the company’s rural patch in southwest England. The company’s pitch to local communities, many of which have little or no internet connectivity, is simple. If roughly a third of residents are willing to sign up for an 18-month contract, then the British telecom startup will wire the entire area with high-speed fiber, guaranteeing speeds that would make even the most tech-savvy city dweller envious. The company’s average speeds are currently 200 megabits per second, but they can be ramped up to 1 gigabit per second — fast enough to download a full-length movie in seconds — with no extra investment. The currently speeds are more than ten times faster than the U.K. average, and the startup’s monthly subscriptions start at under £50. As its fiber is rolled out (including asking farmers for permission to dig through their arable land), TrueSpeed expects to sign up more customers — and pocket more monthly subscriptions — as word spreads about its network. In Priston, the company’s first test village of roughly 80 homes that was connected in early 2016, TrueSpeed’s coverage, for instance, now reaches almost 70 percent of households, according to Matthew Bush, one of the company’s project managers. Currently, Wienburg says his 49-person team is adding roughly 1,600 homes a month, with the goal of 15,000 properties tied to his local network by the end of the year (with roughly one-third of those households signed up for internet packages). If everything goes to plan, the British entrepreneur said he would also look to lease out his network to other telecoms operators, providing locals with even more choice when it comes to surfing the web. That expansion mimics similar bottom-up projects in Sweden, Greece and Italy, where a combination of mobile and fiber investments also has brought high-speed internet access to communities far off the beaten path. Such grassroots projects (either run by nonprofit organizations or private companies like TrueSpeed) fill a much-needed gap in Europe’s efforts to keep pace with the likes of the U.S. and China when it comes to all things digital. Many of the region’s largest telecoms operators already have multibillion euro investment plans in place to upgrade their networks to offer high-speed access to their region-wide (mostly urban) customers. But by focusing on Europe’s rural communities — many of which still cannot access much of the region’s digital single market plans — these internet programs do something even more valuable: extending those same benefits to parts of the EU that would otherwise be left behind. _Mark Scott is chief technology correspondent at _POLITICO.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in a speech today asked his parliamentary group to vote for a parliamentary preliminary criminal investigation regarding allegations of politicians receiving kickbacks in the Novartis scandal, and he blasted previous New ...

A legal battle is about to be fought in New York between Chobani GREEK yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya who is about to sell the company and his ex-wife Ayse Giray, who claims part ownership. According to a New York Daily News report based on court papers, Giray claims Ulukaya got the recipe for the ...

… the British Museum Before the Greeks excelled in science and philosophy … is remeniscent of the important Greek physician, Hypocrites' theory of … seems to differ from the Greek. Moreover, Hippocates lived some 200 …

… a permanent official name because Greece has maintained that its northern … of Alexander the Great’s Greek-led empire. Greek and Bulgarian historians have … as a tourist destination. Northern Greece, with a tourism industry built …

… the area for natural gas. Greece's Foreign Ministry has … in its exclusive economic zone. Greek Cypriots run Cyprus' internationally … by supporters of unification with Greece. Only Turkey recognizes thea Turkish …

From the Parliament gate to the prosecutor or a tiny cell at the police station nearby… One man was arrested at the entrance of the Greek Palriament when he gave guards his Identity Card on Monday morning. The new ID scanners installed last week revealed that the man was wanted by police for bounced cheques. … The post New ID scanners take visitors from Greek Parliament gate to directly to jail appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Monday announced he will request a preliminary investigation into an alleged scandal involving politicians and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis. According to an FBI investigation which was sent to Greek ...

ATHENS – With the ruling Radical Left SYRIZA attacking the Church of Greece for opposing a Macedonia name giveaway to the Former Yugoslav Republic of […] The post President Pavlopoulos Lauds Role of Church of Greece appeared first on The National Herald.